Sunday, September 19, 2010

WTF Wednesday (special Sunday edition) - Cracker Momma

OK, I guess momma is so torked in her wee little brain that she helped me write this post and then put the wrong date in it, so I will let it run. Who knows, maybe by Wednesday she will have simmered down a bit.

Something has been consuming inordinate portions of momma's alarmingly limited mental capacity of late. Rather than explain it to you, I will include a letter that she wrote thusly;

Dear [name withheld] Oil Company,

Enclosed you will find my check for the 2010 - 2011 heating season's oil. Note that I am NOT purchasing the downside insurance. Now, I was very tempted to buy said insurance once I saw the price. In fact I was so excited by the rock bottom price of your insurance that I called your accounting department to thank them. Imagine my surprise when the following conversation ensued;

Me: Wow! .20 cents per gallon! That is great insurance!

Accounting department: Yes, the insurance is twenty cents per gallon.

Me: Twenty cents? But the contract says POINT twenty cents.

Accounting department: No, it says twenty cents.

Me: No it doesn't.

Accounting department: Yes it does

Well, things kind of deteriorated from there, so I rung off and wrote my check for just the oil. Now, I want to point out to you that if your insurance is, indeed, twenty cents per gallon, then your contract is WRONG! Why? Allow me to clarify. Twenty cents per gallon would read like this;

twenty cents per gallon

OR

.20 dollars per gallon

Or even

$.20 / gallon

But .20 cents per gallon is POINT 20 cents per gallon which would make it 20 cents per HUNDRED which IS a great deal.

Now, if what you really want is TWENTY cents per gallon, well, gosh, that means that I would have to assume that the AVERAGE price per gallon is twenty cents less than my contract price over the entire heating season. Hey, that is not a bet I want to take (and if I am proven wrong in the spring please feel free to contact me and shout "neenerneenerneener").

So given that I really like you guys and have been very pleased with your service over the past twenty plus years (heck I even bought a new boiler and air conditioning from you) I am going to assume that your contract had an egregious typographical error.

However, I would advise you to send whoever writes your contracts to decimal point school before next year's edition comes out.

Your loyal customer,

Mango Momma

OK, she didn't sign it Mango Momma, but you get the drift, right? I mean WTF? Even I, Mango, know the difference between .20 cents and 20 cents. Sheesh. I told her to go ahead and buy the insurance at the advertised price but she said, "oh no! That would be kind of mean and I really like that oil company." Whatever! Then just let it go already, will you?

Yuh and in other news the "maintenance required" light came on in my mastiff mobile last week. Momma called the Honda people and they said, "Oh Mango Momma! Please bring your mastiff mobile in for it's 60,000 mile maintenance and be sure to bring a check for $489." WTF?

Well, given her already agitated state of mind she said, "F&*K THAT!" She has quite the potty HBO mouth when riled up. And she did some sort of sneaky thing involving turning the car partially on and holding down buttons and suddenly the light went out and she said, "See Mango? No maintenance required after all and I fixed it for free!" Sigh.

Mango Man! Oh yeah!

P.S. I am including this actual photo that was taken at dog skool yesterday. Look at momma's face! Guess what she is likely thinking about? Yup! Oil insurance do doubt. See my little pal Poncho in the back? He likes to be my training buddy.

43 comments:

We were really worried that we had slept a very long time when we first saw your blog post title. Thanks for the Sunday clarification.

Hu-dad is quite the mechanic because he makes the maintenance required light go out all of the time. He tries to convince the guys who change his oil to stop printing the reminder sticker for just +3000 miles, when he always goes 5000-6000 miles between oil changes, but they will not do it.

Wild Dingo strongly dislikes stupid humans. Wild Dingo approves of your maintenance capabilities. Hell they should send YOU a check for $489 for fixing the problem. geez, they get paid nearly $500 for pushing some stupid buttons. the world isn't right anymore.

Just one more example of the dumbing down of America - they just don't teach math the right way any more. Just imagine what could happen to that company if a whole bunch of people signed that contract and then took them to court for not doing what they said in writing. Your Mom actually did that company a huge favor and they need to thank her in a big way.

We had that silly light come on in our vehicle and they said we needed an oil change - good thing the Momster knew that with this new one, oil changes are only required at 10,000 mile intervals. She did the push the button thingie too.

What the FANG indeed. My mom had a thingy in the mail last week that on Line 5 Said.. Send to the address in the Box above. The box said.. Send to the address listed on Line 5. What the FANG???? I guess the Left paw doesn't know what the Right paw is doing. PROOF READING is needed!!

OK, the oil company people need to go to school. Better schools than the ones they went to the first time. Blog Mom says that something must be done when things get as stupid as this. As a society we started to slide downhill when we let extraneous quotation marks slide. If we'd nipped that in the bud, she says, we might not have all these misplaced apostrophes to contend with. (I told her she meant "with which to contend" but she gave me the old stinkeye.) The end result of allowing grammatical punctuation to run wild is that now mathmatical puncuation seems to mean nothing to some people. Entropy!

Now I have to see that she gets some kind of meds. She's not on any, and that might be part of the problem. She's still going on about stupidity bringing on all kinds of disastrous things.

I think even Oscar could figure out proper decimal point placement though we think that our ma ape has some problems because she believes that I should have about 1 pound of meet per day when it is really supposed to be 10 pounds. Duh.

Our ma ape has a similar dilemma with the sheppy transport module and they are taking too long to get the parts in and will cost many dollars that could be better spent upon foodables. Perhaps she should hire your in-house mechanic to work her magic. Extra money for creative swears!

Oh Mango Man! Our momma has to work with INSURANCE COMPANIES in order to recieve green papers for some of her work. Talk about a cracker-mom!! She won't even call them from home anymore because she doesn't want us to hear her craziness. It's good that you took your mom to school yesterday. You know what the Dog Whisperer says, "excercise, discipline THEN affection." I bet you calmed her down!

Good grief almighty! And why is it that the people who make these errors will always argue until they're blue in the face that they've made no mistake? As Mom says "Why do they let stupid people breed?"

I think your mom may have just come up with a lucrative retirmement business. I'm sure we'd all like to pay her a few green papers to fix our cars instead of those nutjobs at the car companies!

That is telling them Mango Momma! Those oil people will try to take you for everything they can get. Sorry to hear that your Mango Mobile was sick. I hope the light doesn't go on in our dog crate on wheels because we are sure Barbara would not push the right buttons and then be crying when she had to pay Honda all that money. Hope you had fun at school.

wow. tuff stuff. Good thing your momma set those oil guys straight and knows how to turn off the expensive light. Anyway, I can't stay long cuz we just got fleas and now we can't visit any of our dog furiends for fear of passing them on. :( (can you believe the treatment was $80? Maybe your momma can give us a tip on some cheaper stuff for fixin' fleas. She seems to have a skill with the dollar cuttin'.)

Do you want to send us Oil Company's address? Mark and I have studied decimals for several years now, and I can send them the pages from our math book in third grade explaining money things, and 4th and 5th grade start talking about decimals. We will be happy to help.

My momma fixes her cars the way your momma does, and our 4WD GMC mastiff-mobile finally bit the dust after 22 years and 300,000 miles, in March. Momma says dealerships just try to rip off people they think are dodo birds, especially lovely ladies like your momma and mine.

I've never heard of oil insurance. You pay for the oil to heat your house, yes. But then you pay the oil company on top of that to, what, keep the price steady? Then they won't honor their own written contract (after all, it's THEIR error). Is this insurance or extortion?

Mango, I sympathize totally with your mom's plight. It almost read like that old-time skit "Who's On First?".

On our journey this weekend from Orlando to Tampa we found a town that worships your Mango-ness and snapped some photos. Is this an early settlement of your followers? Have you heard of the great township of Mango, FL? Let me know where I can send you pictures to prove you have a cult starting up here in Central FL.

Murray's Mom had great fun (well, it wasn't really fun at all) with the house alarm people the other day - not to mention the mechanic in the garage when her car broke down last week (in the middle of a very busy motorway!!)

Big companies make mistakes... even if they don't want to accept it!Godd job, Mango's mom!Those lights make my mom come into panic attacks everytimes she sees them!I will tell her about your mom's solution!Kisses and hugsLorenza

Mrs Mango...Is that 'cooking oil'? ...or baby oil? BOL! Mr Mango... I like your training buddy - I think he/she's as small as me! Cant wait for my own lessons to start...Maxmom says they start in two weeks time....Woofies!Lotsalicks to my bud Dexter too. Mr Mango...please tell Dex that I luvs playing with black labradorks!LotsalicksTOBY PUPPY IN SOUTH AFRICA

Our people never even heard of this. SOunds like MangoMama was a bit torked! It's necessary to write to companies sometimes. The question is, do they even care? Ah well, we are just dogs, so it's our job to sooth and calm the folks. Smooches,BabyRD and Hootie

ps-Dear MangoMama, would have loved to get together with you while in MA, but time got away. Maybe next time, or if you come out west! X-BRD & Hootie'sMom

We are new to the concept of oil insurance, but are on principle totally against forking out any more money than is strictly necessary on any occasion. Bearing in mind, of course, that tasty treats, petrol for driving to nice places for me to walk, expensive dogs bedding and toys, high quality canine health insurance (Gail can use the NHS) are all classified as totally essential.Toodle pip! Bertie. PS We agree that Mango Momma is not looking her very best in that photo, but also wonder if the expression could be interpreted as a misguided 'homage' to your own facial appearance....

Teehee. My Mom does that with her car (the Jeep, not the race car) all the time; something about kind of turning it on and stepping on various foot pedals, and then the annoying dingy messages go away. And your oil company sounds like a bunch of dopes. Your Mom might want to send them a "Money for Dummies" book. I'm just saying...

Some people just don't understand money! Papa went into a McD's to buy something and their computers were down. He did the math in his head real quick and told the kid that he was charge something like 400% tax on what he was getting. The kid called the manager and they added it up on paper then looked at each other and told Papa that there wouldn't be any tax while their computers were down! LOL